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From my friend Kyle Dunbar - if you want to join in - sign up on her blog. "I am giddy with excitement about the opportunity to host a Virtual Book Club discussing the fantastic book Flattening Classrooms, Engaging Minds: Move to Global Collaboration One Step at a Time by Julie Lindsay and Vicki A. Davis. The book club was announced last Sunday night in my school division and I am thrilled that we already have thirteen teachers signed up! Even better, we have teachers from across our school division and from all different grade levels. It is a wonderful thing when already busy teachers find time in their lives to discuss powerful educational ideas with their peers.  Now, I am ready to get some global participation in this book club. I can't think of a better way to brainstorm about global projects than to have teachers from across the globe in the session together. So, we are inviting all teachers, parents, students, thinkers and learners out there to join us for six live meetings to share what they think about the projects, resources, and research discussed in Flattening Classrooms, Engaging Minds. We will be meeting on Mondays at 7:30pm EST on the following dates: January 7th January 21st February 4th February 18th March 4th March 18th (find the time in your area here) Meetings will be live using Blackboard Collaborate and will last one hour. We will spend the time sharing thoughts about ideas raised in the book. It will also be a great opportunity to connect with other educators that share similar passions and beliefs about flattening our classrooms walls. We will share strategies and resources for building those 21st century skills like collaboration, communication and creativity in authentic ways.

I met Jutta Treviranus from the FLOE project. This is about creating open resources that are translatable, move from place to place, can be modified and made accessible to everyone. It is has tools that will make your content accessible for all learners. If you're making free content, you'll want to go to this website and look at their tools to help make your content accessible to everyone. This is great because it can help translate into other languages for the content we're creating for Flat Classroom.

Great stuff from Wes Fyer

Some excellent tips from Jennifer Carey. I know classrooms CAN move beyond the central control of a school imposed LMS - the students are ready, let's get the teachers ready!

"Yesterday I worked with a librarian who is going to help 4th and 5th grade students next week record "narrated slideshows" to practice their oral communication skills telling stories with "story cards" from different perspectives. (1st person singular, 1st person plural, 2nd person, 3rd person singular, etc.) This is an excellent Common Core-aligned language project. She helped me record a 4.5 minute video tutorial about this, in which I show the steps for creating a narrated slideshow using the free iPad app "ShowMe." "